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Model City Blues tells the story of how regular people, facing a changing city landscape, fought for their own model of the “ideal city” by creating grassroots plans for urban renewal. Filled with vivid descriptions of significant moments in a protracted struggle, it offers a street-level account of organized resistance to institutional plans to transform New Haven, Connecticut in the 1960s. Anchored in the physical spaces and political struggles of the city, it brings back to center stage the individuals and groups who demanded that their voices be heard. By reexamining the converging class- and race-based movements of 1960s New Haven, Mandi Jackson helps to explain the city's present-day economic and political struggles. More broadly, by closely analyzing particular sites of resistance in New Haven, Model City Blues employs multiple academic disciplines to redefine and reimagine the roles of everyday city spaces in building social movements and creating urban landscapes.
Model City Blues tells the story of how regular people, facing a changing city landscape, fought for their own model of the “ideal city” by creating grassroots plans for urban renewal. Filled with vivid descriptions of significant moments in a protracted struggle, it offers a street-level account of organized resistance to institutional plans to transform New Haven, Connecticut in the 1960s. Anchored in the physical spaces and political struggles of the city, it brings back to center stage the individuals and groups who demanded that their voices be heard. By reexamining the converging class- and race-based movements of 1960s New Haven, Mandi Jackson helps to explain the city's present-day economic and political struggles. More broadly, by closely analyzing particular sites of resistance in New Haven, Model City Blues employs multiple academic disciplines to redefine and reimagine the roles of everyday city spaces in building social movements and creating urban landscapes.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.
An exploration of how and why American city governments delegated the responsibility for solving urban inequality to the nonprofit sector. American cities are rife with nonprofit organizations that provide services ranging from arts to parks, and health to housing. These organizations have become so ubiquitous, it can be difficult to envision a time when they were fewer, smaller, and more limited in their roles. Turning back the clock, however, uncovers both an eye-opening story of how the nonprofit sector became such a dominant force in American society, as well as a troubling one of why this growth occurred alongside persistent poverty and widening inequality. Claire Dunning's book connects these two stories in histories of race, democracy, and capitalism, revealing an underexplored transformation in urban governance: how the federal government funded and deputized nonprofits to help individuals in need, and in so doing avoided addressing the structural inequities that necessitated such action in the first place. ​Nonprofit Neighborhoods begins in the decades after World War II, when a mix of suburbanization, segregation, and deindustrialization spelled disaster for urban areas and inaugurated a new era of policymaking that aimed to solve public problems with private solutions. From deep archival research, Dunning introduces readers to the activists, corporate executives, and politicians who advocated addressing poverty and racial exclusion through local organizations, while also raising provocative questions about the politics and possibilities of social change. The lessons of Nonprofit Neighborhoods exceed the municipal bounds of Boston, where much of the story unfolds, providing a timely history of the shift from urban crisis to urban renaissance for anyone concerned about American inequality--past, present, or future.
The Urban Racial State introduces a new multi-disciplinary analytical approach to urban racial politics that provides a bridging concept for urban theory, racism theory, and state theory. This perspective, dubbed by Noel A. Cazenave as the Urban Racial State, both names and explains the workings of the political structure whose chief function for cities and other urban governments is the regulation of race relations within their geopolitical boundaries. In The Urban Racial State, Cazenave incorporates extensive archival and oral history case study data to support the placement of racism analysis as the focal point of the formulation of urban theory and the study of urban politics. Cazenave's approach offers a set of analytical tools that is sophisticated enough to address topics like the persistence of the urban racial state under the rule of African Americans and other politicians of color.
There are nearly 500 public works of art throughout New Haven, Connecticut--a city of 17 square miles with 130,000 residents. While other historic East Coast cities--Philadelphia, Providence, Boston--have been the subjects of book-length studies on the function and meaning of public art, New Haven (founded 1638) has largely been ignored. This comprehensive analysis provides an overview of the city's public art policy, programs and preservation, and explores its two centuries of public art installations, monuments and memorials in a range of contexts.
A landmark work of intimate reporting on inequality, race, class, and violence, told through a murder and intersecting lives in an iconic American neighborhood. One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in innocent sixteen-year-old Bobby being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and what it reveals about the enduring legacies of social and economic disparity. In The Other Side of Prospect, he has produced an immersive portrait of a seminal community in an old American city now beset by division and gun violence. Tracing the histories of three people whose lives meet in tragedy—victim Pete Fields, likely murderer Major, and Bobby—Dawidoff indelibly describes optimistic families coming north from South Carolina as part of the Great Migration, for the promise of opportunity and upward mobility, and the harrowing costs of deindustrialization and neglect. Foremost are the unique challenges confronted by children like Major and Bobby coming of age in their “forgotten” neighborhood, steps from Yale University. After years in prison, with the help of a true-believing lawyer, Bobby is finally set free. His subsequent struggles with the memories of prison, and his heartbreaking efforts to reconnect with family and community, exemplify the challenges the formerly incarcerated face upon reentry into society and, writes Reginald Dwayne Betts, make this “the best book about the crisis of incarceration in America.” The Other Side of Prospect is a reportorial tour de force, at once a sweeping account of how the injustices of racism and inequality reverberate through the generations, and a beautifully written portrait of American city life, told through a group of unforgettable people and their intertwined experiences.
In 1997, after General Motors shuttered a massive complex of factories in the gritty industrial city of Flint, Michigan, signs were placed around the empty facility reading, “Demolition Means Progress,” suggesting that the struggling metropolis could not move forward to greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball. Much more than a trite corporate slogan, the phrase encapsulates the operating ethos of the nation’s metropolitan leadership from at least the 1930s to the present. Throughout, the leaders of Flint and other municipalities repeatedly tried to revitalize their communities by demolishing outdated and inefficient structures and institutions and overseeing numerous urban renewal campaigns—many of which yielded only more impoverished and more divided metropolises. After decades of these efforts, the dawn of the twenty-first century found Flint one of the most racially segregated and economically polarized metropolitan areas in the nation. In one of the most comprehensive works yet written on the history of inequality and metropolitan development in modern America, Andrew R. Highsmith uses the case of Flint to explain how the perennial quest for urban renewal—even more than white flight, corporate abandonment, and other forces—contributed to mass suburbanization, racial and economic division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom about structural inequality and the roots of the nation’s “urban crisis,” Demolition Means Progress shows in vivid detail how public policies and programs designed to revitalize the Flint area ultimately led to the hardening of social divisions.
John Gennari sets out on a quest to find tutti, the everythingness that sits on the edgenow smooth, now serratedbetween Italian America and African America. Tutti, a black friend of his says, the unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain . . . . Frank Sinatra s legend has meanwhile grown through the idolatry of a new hip-hop generation, we see octogenarian Tony Bennett (Anthony Dominick Benedetto) undertaking concert tours with 20-something Lady Gag (Stefani Angelina Germanotta) while Mario Batali continues to imperialize and monetize Italian cuisine, and Rick Pitino and other Italian American coaches shape championship rounds of college basketball. The essential argument about American culture, Gennari persuasively insists, is the argument about racespecifically, whether blackness, as supporters of jazz exhorted, is an essential ingredient of American cultural reality, or whether, as white nativists warned, going back to the 1920s, it is a dangerous threat to national identity, a force of cultural degeneracy. By the early 60s, Motown had set up cross-racialism by modeling the figure of the Italian pop ballad singer (and Marvin Gaye cut four ballads-and-standards Motown albums, his touchstones being Nat King Cole but also Sinatra and Perry Como). Gennari deftly sketches the interweavings of Italian and African American popular music from jazz to doo wop, soul to hip hop, including the surprising history of Italians in New Orleans music early in the 20th century. Then there s Spike Lee s Do the Right Thing, evoking the racism of Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, but showcasing the untarnished Brooklyn neighborhoods of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens. New York and New Jersey and New Haven are at the center of this remarkable book about the intermingling, mergers, contact zones of African America and Italian America, a big space where territorial masculinity vibrates with robust matriarchal energy; where traditions of singing, dancing, and eating embrace the funky vitality and unembarrassed pleasures of the body; where ear-and-eye intensive sensibilities mark extroverted, charismatic presentations of the public self; a history, complicated to be sure, of collaboration, intimacy, hostility, and distancing. Gennari writes with passion, drawing on black and Italian cultural history, literature, food TV, performance art, and cultural criticism to explore the alterations of pain and pleasure, suffering and joy, deprivation and abundance which have produced so much music, cuisine, athletic prowess, and cinemafull of flavor and soulfulness intrinsic to the nation s spirit and psychic health. "